No. 2293

Hashed Chicken, Baked

Hachis de Volaille au Gratin

Cut a pound of the white meat of a chicken into three-sixteenths inch squares. Fry one shallot in butter without allowing it to brown, add some reduced bechamel sauce (No. 412) and the chicken, seasoning with salt, prepared red pepper (No. 168) and nutmeg. Place on the edges of the basin of a dish a border of potato, pushing it through a pocket furnished with a star-shaped socket; fill the inside of this border with the hash, bestrew with bread-crumbs, pour butter over and bake in a hot oven.

← No. 2292 Hashed Chicken, Ancient Style Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2294 Hashed Lamb a la Celestine-Baked →

For the Modern Kitchen

A tidy Ranhofer entrée that depends almost entirely on the sauce being thick enough to hold the diced meat together. The cross-references to other numbered recipes are the main obstacle for a modern reader.

The hinge: reduce the béchamel hardThe hinge: reduce the béchamel hard -- The sauce must be stiff enough that the hash mounds rather than runs, or it will flood the potato border in the oven. Reduce a standard béchamel until it coats a spoon heavily and barely slumps off, roughly the consistency of soft cream cheese. The recipe specifies no quantity, only "some": judge by texture, using just enough to bind the pound of meat without loosening it.
"Prepared red pepper" (No. 168)Ranhofer keeps a separate numbered preparation for red pepper, which is not reproduced here. A small pinch of plain cayenne stirred into the sauce will stand in.
"A pocket furnished with a star-shaped socket"A piping bag with a large star tube. Pipe the border while the potato is hot; it stiffens as it cools and cracks if forced through cold.
The potato borderPlain mashed potato slumps. Use a duchesse-type mixture "stiff mashed potato beaten with an egg yolk or two and a little butter, no milk, so it holds its ridges and browns.
Hot ovenThe recipe says only "hot oven"; in modern terms that is somewhere in the region of 425F. The dish is already cooked through; the oven is only there to set the border, melt the butter and brown the crumbs, which should not take long.
The shallotOne shallot, minced fine, sweated in butter until translucent only. Browning it pushes the flavour toward onion soup and shows as dark flecks in a white hash.
Dice sizeThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm " small enough that the hash eats as one texture. Cut it by hand with a sharp knife; a food processor turns cooked breast to paste.
Chicken and yieldA pound of white meat is roughly the breast meat of a large roasting chicken, or the usable white meat of a poached bird. The recipe gives no yield, but a pound of meat would plausibly serve four as an entrée.
Bread-crumbs and butterDry fine crumbs, not fresh, and melted butter poured over rather than dotted; fresh crumbs absorb the sauce and stay pale.

A Little History

This is Charles Ranhofer's Hachis de Volaille au Gratin from The Epicurean (1894), written out of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York. It sits in a run of hashes because that is precisely what a large restaurant kitchen needed: an elegant way to use yesterday's poached or roasted breast meat. The piped potato border is doing double duty as garnish and as a wall, a device French kitchens of the period applied to everything from creamed sweetbreads to salmon, and it is of a piece with the duchesse potato ring still taught in classical curricula. Note also that Ranhofer never writes out the b ation here " The Epicurean is built as a numbered reference system, on the assumption that the cook already has the mother sauces standing in the larder and needs only the assembly.